May
11 - At "21" in New York City, the
United States Football League announces its
plans to begin play with the 1983 season.
Denver is listed among the cities to field
charter USFL teams.

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June
16 - Former Denver Broncos head coach Robert
"Red" Miller is named head coach of
the team, which takes the name Denver Gold.

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July
12 - Denver owner Ron Blanding hosts a USFL
meeting at which the league forms a committee to
study the problem of drug abuse in pro
football. The league also adopts the
two-point conversion at this meeting.

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August
31 - The Gold are aligned in the USFL's Pacific
Division along with the Arizona Wranglers, Los
Angeles Express and Oakland Invaders.

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9 8 3

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January
4 - In the first round of the inaugural USFL
Draft, the Gold select DB Demetrious Johnson of
Missouri. Johnson never plays a down in a
Gold uniform.

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February
- In an effort to spur ticket sales for their
home opener, the Gold offer an innovative
program - if after one quarter of football you
don't like the quality of play, you can leave
the stadium and get a full refund of your ticket
price.

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March
6 - The Denver Gold debut in a 13-7 loss to the
Philadelphia Stars, but the real story is the
attendance - 45,102 cross the turnstiles at Mile
High Stadium, with less than 1% requesting
refunds under the team's innovative refund
policy.

Had
the United States Football League
comprised 12 owners like Denver Gold owner
Ron Blanding, odds are the league would be
in existence today as a viable spring pro
football league. Blanding, a
Colorado real estate developer, took David
Dixon's gameplan for the USFL to heart,
extensively marketing the team in the
Denver area while at the same time
spending like a miser in areas where it
wasn't necessary..

The
team had Larry Canada, Joe Gilliam, and future San
Francisco 49ers running back Harry Sydney on their
roster for name players, and that was about it
when it came to marketability. But the
marketing and promotion worked like a charm for
the Gold, who boasted the league's best attendance
despite a 7-11-0 record and Blanding's firing of
enormously popular head coach Red Miller after a
4-7-0 start. Though he replaced Miller with
popular former Denver Bronco quarterback Craig
Morton, the results on the field were roughly the
same.

The Denver Gold on the field weren't winners in
1983, but Blanding had won what he considered a
greater victory - at the bank. When all was
said and done after the league's first year,
Blanding could make a distinction that no other
USFL owner could - his Gold had made a
profit. The way Blanding saw it, that was
most important. He was a happy USFL owner.

Blanding
became even happier when Doug Spedding, a
regionally-known auto dealer, approached him about
buying the Gold after 1983. Seeing that
other USFL teams were getting reckless in their
spending habits and not wishing to join them in
that endeavor, Blanding came to terms with
Spedding and sold the team for $10 million -
making another profit as he walked out the door.

The 1984 Denver Gold were a competitive team in a
relatively weak USFL Pacific Division. Using
five different quarterbacks during the course of
the season, Craig Morton proved inneffective at
building the Gold into a winner, going
9-9-0. The team finished one game behind the
L.A. Express and Arizona Wranglers in the
division, just missing the playoffs.
Attendance had dipped but was still near an
average of 35,000 per game. RB Harry Sydney
rushed for 961 yards and 10 touchdowns in one of
the few exceptional performances on a team that
otherwise remained relatively colorless compared
to their USFL brethren. After the season,
Spedding and Morton parted company, with Darrell
"Mouse" Davis being brought in from the
Houston Gamblers in an effort to get the Gold in
the playoffs in 1985.

But just as the Gold were establishing themselves
as a product worth watching by Denver football
fans, the owners of the USFL cut the rug out from
under them. The announcement that the league
was switching to a fall schedule in 1986 had an
immediate, devastating impact on the Gold.
Denver had grown to like the Gold, but they adored
their NFL Denver Broncos, and given the choice of
one or the other in the fall, they were sticking
with the Broncos. Doug Spedding saw his $10
million investment go up in flames in 1985 as
attendance dropped by an average of nearly 20,000
fans per game, despite fielding a team that
finally reached the USFL playoffs, going
11-7-0. The Gold, who just two years earlier
were given the privilege of hosting the inaugural
USFL Championship Game due to their attendance
figures, wound up playing on the road in the 1985
playoffs against the Memphis Showboats, a
lower-seeded team, because their attendance had
become so bad.

In their final game the Gold were thrashed by the
Showboats, 48-7. After the season Spedding,
having lost millions thanks to the decision to
move the USFL to the fall, decided to merge his
team with the Jacksonville Bulls (which had among
the league's best attendance figures in 1985) in
an effort to salvage at least some of his
investment. The USFL
v. NFL verdict drove the final nail in the
coffin however - the USFL, and the Denver Gold,
were both dead.